It is hard to believe that anyone who defends Israel's legitimacy as a state would buy into former Speaker Newt Gingrich's argument that Palestine is an "invented nation".

The
singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state
and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first
Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not born until 1882.
His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern
language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the
Bible.

The founder of the Israeli state was Theodor Herzl
(1860-1904), an assimilated Viennese writer who was convinced by the
Dreyfus trial in France - and the horrendous right-wing anti-Semitism that resulted from it - that Jews had to get out of Europe.

In 1897, he wrote the book that would essentially inaugurate the Zionist movement. It was called Der Judenstaat(meaning
"the Jews' state" or "the Jewish State"), which was his proposal for
moving the Jews out of Europe and into their own country.

He
didn't specify where the Jewish homeland should be. He was more
concerned about quickly obtaining territory anywhere for Jews to seek
refuge.